When NOT to Grow Your Business

Are you setting the right goals for your business, or are you getting lost in the hustle for growth? 

Reflect on where your focus should be, whether it's laying a solid foundation or gearing up for growth, and embrace the fluid nature of business. Remember, it's okay to shift between these focuses, and giving yourself some grace can be just as important as hitting those sales targets. 

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*Intro/outro song credit:
King Around Here by Alex Grohl

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting Goals for Business Growth
• 3:53 Foundational Focus for Business Growth
• 10:14 Future Focus for Business Growth

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

Not every goal that you set for your business has to be based on growth. Sometimes it's a matter of we need to stabilize some things before we can even focus on those growth pieces. And yet, naturally, we just constantly want to grow more sales, more revenue, more impact but that's not always what we need in our business. Today, I'm going to guide you through some different goals that you can be setting that maybe they're designed for growth, but also maybe it's just a chance for you to create a foundation for your business. My name is Craig and I'm the CEO of Desi Financial Coaching. Our goal is simple to help you run a therapy practice that is permanently profitable. If you own a solo or group practice, we're here to help you build a business that creates more time, makes more money and serves more people. This is the Therapy Business Podcast. If you're like me, you're big on trying to maximize, trying to grow, looking for that next way to hit the next level of a revenue target, or growing your team or engaging in more clients, whatever it is, it's hard to stop, it's hard to get out of that growth mode and time and time again, we'll come across clients who are just like this, and sometimes it's the case. It's. Yeah, you're right, you need to lean in, let's get some more sales, let's get some more cash coming into the business, but sometimes that's not what they need. You know, we've had times where we've met with clients who were like you know what, actually, if you get another sale, it's going to hurt you. We need to actually fix and resolve some things before we can focus on that next piece. Well, a few weeks ago, a mastermind, one of my mastermind members, kathy Wagner. She shared a strategy that she works with her clients in and this resonated so completely that I really wanted to bring it in and share it with you. And it's the two different types of focuses that you can have in your goal setting and I'm going to break those down to what they can look like. But sometimes in our goals, like I said, it's not always growth, but growth is one of them. So sometimes you have a growth focus year. This is a time where you are focusing on that growth piece. And then sometimes you're in a foundational focus and this is where you're trying to stabilize, you're trying to fix something, you're trying to plant seeds so that you can harvest later, and that's okay. It's okay, it's your business is going to have the ups and downs. It's going to have massive growth years and it's going to have years that either take a dip or just don't really climb as quickly as you maybe hoped or as previous years have. So let's dig into some of those foundational focus goals that you might be setting for your business.

Speaker 1: 2:35

Foundational focus a few examples of these might be setting up paying yourself. So this is super common when we come across business owners is they're not paying themselves a salary. They're not paying themselves a salary. They are working hard. They're pulling out money just kind of whenever they need cash to pay some bills. I was this way for a very long time. It's, oh, our personal account's low. I'd better pull some money out of the business and bring it over to the personal account, or I would. If the month was good, my paycheck would be bigger, and if the month was bad in the business, then my paycheck will be tiny. I wasn't prioritizing paying myself, and so this is a focus area that we need to fix.

Speaker 1: 3:18

If your personal life is not covered by finances, it's really hard to fully engage in the business. You're gonna get the business. You're going to get burnt out. You're going to get to a point where you don't love the business anymore, and we need to be careful of that. So, setting that paying yourself. If you're not doing that, that may be what you need to focus on as we go into 2025, is I need to fix this pay structure so that my business can pay me what I need. Make sure it's enough to cover my personal expenses and to cover my ideal lifestyle, not just to survive on my personal side, but to thrive. We want you to cover your ideal lifestyle, the things you really enjoy and want to enjoy.

Speaker 1: 3:53

The next one would be managing your expenses. So expenses getting out of control, getting out of whack, getting out of balance, is incredibly common. This can sneak up on you this has happened to me and it's happened to me, you know, admittedly, multiple times in my business where maybe I'll get it under control and then I'll look down and all of a sudden we're creeping up to, you know, 50, 60% operating expenses, where ideally, I want to be between 40 and 50% in my business, and so I need to Stop the growth focus and start working on managing the expenses Now. Sometimes more sales is going to help this right, because more cash coming in means your expenses percentage is going to decrease naturally with it. But sometimes it's just a matter of do we need to make some changes in how we're managing our money? Are we just overspending? Do we need to do an expense audit and go through which? We have an episode on how to do that I'll link in the show notes that you can go back and learn about some of our tricks, like keep cut, trim ways to go through and really find those key areas. But sometimes that's what we're focusing on. This may not be a full year. This may be a quarter or six months. That this is your goal, this is your target. And so, again, you're less about sales, you're more about let's get these expenses locked down. You're more about let's get these expenses locked down. Maybe go through and reduce our spend by 10% across multiple areas.

Speaker 1: 5:13

The third one in the foundational focus would be strengthening your team. So are you setting up the team this is where I have been the past probably 18 months is creating this team to handle more growth. So we almost stabilized. We've grown a little bit over the past 18 months. Our revenue has increased, but the focus hasn't been on let's get clients, clients, clients. It's been yeah, we're trying to get clients always. That's important. We need cash, we need a business in order to have a business.

Speaker 1: 5:50

But we are in this place where I was placed in some pieces. We hired a couple years ago a director of personal finance coaching to Alicia. She's amazing. She handles all of our personal finance coaching section. Then I was doing all the profit coaching myself and I needed to step back because I wasn't able to focus on these growth pieces because I was so busy seeing clients that I had to hire a person to take over that. Now we have Vanessa, who's our head profit coach, and so she's been with us for about a year taking over that and she's been taking all the profit coaching clients to this point. And then earlier this year we hired another personal finance coach to help in that area with Christine, and she's also amazing. All of our team is just incredible, but that has been our focus. She's also amazing. All of our team is just incredible, but that has been our focus. Now that we have all these core pieces in place, everyone is feeling confident and they know what to do. They're equipped to do their job well. That means in 2025, we are now able to shift to that growth focus model mindset.

Speaker 1: 6:41

But it wasn't that case for us and in hindsight, as I was learning these, I'm going oh, that makes me feel so much better that I'm beating myself up. Oh man, we just did not grow. And people like how's business and I'm part of what's like. It's not great, but it's actually good. It's really good. It's just it's maybe not as much growth as I saw the year before I started growing this team.

Speaker 1: 7:06

All right, the final foundational piece is marketing and that's your marketing engines. Are they performing well? Are you converting well? If you have email sales sequences, are they turning people into clients? Are they converting well? Are you getting enough leads in? So this is kind of setting up that core foundation piece. It's less about the sales and getting more clients. It's more about do we have effective marketing tools? We have a bunch of episodes where we've brought in marketing experts. So I recommend just kind of filtering through our catalog of podcast episodes and find a few, just depending on your target area whether it's paid ads, whether it's SEO, whether it's just content marketing. Go through and see how you can utilize some of that information, maybe to help fortify your marketing, if that's your focus right now. So those are the four main foundational focus piece.

Speaker 1: 7:57

Now I want to talk about the growth focus. So this is the one that we're so used to. Is that growth focus? And if you feel like you've got all those other things locked in, then here's three key areas that we can focus on when we're growing. Number one is sales. So that is the more obvious one, right? It's the. We need to close more clients, we need to get more people in the door, get more sales and increase revenue. So anytime we're in a growth focus, typically we're setting revenue goals, we're setting revenue targets. So that is probably the more obvious one, but it's also the more common one, and so just know that that's one that you're going to almost always be in and out of. However, it's not the only growth focus, so just because that's the most common one doesn't mean it's the only one. We also have profit, cash flow, improving your profit and cash flow. This can be increasing margins, it can be adding new offerings, it can be a lot of different things to help improve your company's profitability. This is all part of growth, because as your profit grows, that means your business is growing.

Speaker 1: 8:57

And then, finally, is time growth, and this one can be really, really, really challenging. This is Freeing up your time as the business owner, freeing up your time as the practice owner, not seeing patients all day long, five days a week, but actually having the capacity to focus on growing the business, to work on the business, having time for your family, time to do the things you want to do, not working 80 hours a week or however long it is in the business. That is a growth focus. So this actually may not bring in more dollars. This may bring in less business. That is a growth focus. So this actually may not bring in more dollars. This may bring in less dollars. So this can be opposite of that sales growth.

Speaker 1: 9:32

But you're focusing on time growth. This is as I've been strengthening my team. A huge part of it was time freeing up my time, and so that's. We didn't see revenue growth as much as we thought we would. And as I'm letting go of clients, I'm letting go of somebody and then I'm paying somebody to take on a client. So that means if it's a one for one, if I lose one and one of my employees takes one, then we're losing money in that sense because I have to pay them to see that client, whereas previously it was me seeing them and I wasn't having to pay anybody to do it. So you can see how a time growth in a lot of cases can almost go backwards on the revenue piece.

Speaker 1: 10:14

As you get ready for 2025, and I purposely made this episode really just shortened to the point because I want you to take some time just think about 2025.

Speaker 1: 10:22

Where are you going to be as we finish out Q4 of 2024, or whenever you're listening to this? This could be five years down the road and you're listening to this. What is your focus gonna be? Are you gonna be in a foundational focus or growth focus? Get clear on where you wanna be and give yourself grace if it's not a sales-minded focus in the next season of your life and business and then push forward and know that it's constantly changing. And again, it's not a full year, it can be quarters or six months that you're foundational focused and then you're moving into the growth focus. But get clear on where you want to be and I'm excited to hear about what it does in your business. Thanks for joining us on the Therapy Business Podcast. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share it with a practice owner that you may know. If your practice needs help getting organized with its finances or just growing your practice, head to therapybusinesspodcom to learn how we can help.